'The Rite' Gets It All Wrong

In Mikael Håfström’s “The Rite,” a troubled young seminarian named Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue) travels to Italy and turns to the practice of exorcism under the tutelage of the renegade Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins). The film is based on the book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” by journalist Matt Baglio, who shadowed an American Catholic priest in Rome as he took a course at a Vatican-affiliated university in order to become an exorcist. The book, and by extension the film, was intended to challenge the negative stereotypes about exorcism created and perpetuated by contemporary culture and cinema. Ironically, because the film constantly falls back upon horror clichés—enlivened but emphasized by genre master Anthony Hopkins’s participation—it accomplishes the exact opposite, reinforcing the very perceptions the film was intended to combat.

Like many overwrought horror movies, “The Rite” relies on redundant visual cues to signal the psychological mood. There are only two lighting schemes: dark and darker. Even Rome, one of the most colorful cities of the world, becomes overcast and stormy shortly after Michael’s arrival. That alone would be more than enough to suggest that the path of the exorcist is a dark one. Yet the film still feels the need to pummel the viewer with stock material to make the same point. There are crucifixes everywhere, sometimes more than one on a single wall, and if there are no crucifixes to be had, then a statuette of a saint can invariably be found gazing down reprovingly at all the human goings-on.

When O’Donoghue’s Michael arrives at this gloomy caricature of Rome, his mentor is Father Lucas Trevant, an entertaining character insofar as we all know that Anthony Hopkins is never up to any good. Bustling around Rome in long black robes, Father Lucas makes house calls to the possessed and speaks in accented Italian—all the while scarcely able to contain the crazy dancing behind his eyes. He is a predator marking out the weak hidden in the dark recesses of society. Hopkins’s portrayal of Father Lucas is as lighthearted and convivial as one can reasonably expect for an unsettling exorcist, and with this welcome levity he briefly dominates the film. But, predictably, he soon descends into sociopathy and becomes as absurd as the film’s premise and landscape.

The movie opens with a quote from John Paul II: “The battle against the Devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the Devil is still alive and active in the world.” Given such a formidable foe, one would expect the people possessed by demons in the film to be effective agents of evil and corruption, but those possessed in “The Rite” are more remarkable for their weaknesses. The audience does not fear a character like Rosaria (Marta Gastini), a pregnant 16-year-old recently raped by her father and now possessed by the devil; instead, it pities her. The ability of the possessed to fight back against those trying to purge them of their possession is what gives other similar films, like “The Exorcist,” the dramatic tension completely lacking in “The Rite.”

Ultimately, “The Rite” is undone by its contradictory impulses. It aims to be a horror film, with all the absurdity that the genre entails—from scenes of Rosaria and Father Lucas choking up nails, to one of Michael finding a pool of demonic frogs in Father Lucas’s quaint Roman courtyard. But the film also hopes to frighten its viewers in a more realistic sense by insinuating that the Devil could possess anyone and that his horrors could be part of our reality. When all is said and done, the campy absurdity of the former impulse undoes any hope of achieving the latter. “The Rite” comes across as highly implausible, continuing the cinematic tradition of making exorcism appear preposterous. With it, Baglio’s book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” has ironically come full circle.

—Staff writer Catherine A. Morris can be reached at morris6@fas.harvard.edu.